labor migration

Economic development requires people to move to where the jobs are, from lagging to leading regions within a country or across borders. This leads to optimal utilization of their human capital and to important gains for them and the economy. The movement of migrants to economic opportunities and to networks that help them integrate the labor market, leads to geographical concentrations of migrant populations. Notably the flows of high-skilled migrants are very concentrated, as they tend to go to few countries worldwide, and to a few selected areas within the country. Agglomeration effects and knowledge spillovers increase the productivity of high-skilled workers who work in the same area or collaborate with other high-skilled workers.

Despite the growing scale of forced displacement, it is increasingly clear that traditional durable solutions are only working for a limited number of refugees across the globe. The realization of durable solutions for refugees remains bleak: repatriation is often not possible due to persistent insecurity and weak governance; host countries continue to resist or restrict opportunities for local integration; and resettlement slots remain limited to less than 1% of the global refugee population. In recent years, academics have argued that continued emphasis on these three solutions “fails to recognize a fundamental need to move away from understanding all solutions simply in terms of ‘fixing’ people in places.”